Sorcery

hi,
sorry if this is posted in the wrong place!
basically i'm studying architecture at liverpool university and have been asked to design a house for a client who's background involves sorcery.
i'm wondering if anyone can point my in the direction of certain types of magic/cults that could be implemented in my design. for example the building has to contain a 'special room' which would be used for the clients particular background (which i have to create around the sorcery idea - other students got stuff such as escapism, ecology etc) so it would be interesting to look into some cults that follow rituals? so i could use the rituals in the design.

many thanks!

[edit on 15-1-2008 by blackflagredstar]

Is this a made up client for an assignment or a real person? There are so many different "cults" and magical/metaphysical beliefs that it would be impossible to tell you how to incorporate something like that into a design. You risk insulting someone because they take their beliefs very seriously and you may inadvertently offend them.

Is it possible to find out exactly what they need? They should be telling you what they want.

What i do know: All magic relates to the elements and directions ("watchtowers, etc"). You will want the special room to have NSEW marked and representation of the Earth, Water, Air, and Fire.

You'll want a round room that has a glass domed ceiling, a large window facing the morning sun, a pool of water or fountain in the west, maybe a jacuzzi or hot tob, an altar or large table/desk area in the north, and ideally a fireplace or some kind of vented heat/fire/ thing in the south.

Space for stained glass around the circumference would be great.
The glass could be simply astrology, or something more esoteric like Enochian.

Start there.

Of utmost importance is privacy, so a second floor might be prefered, even a rooftop, but if the imaginary landscape is secluded enough this whole temple could be an outdoors environment, ideally something that can be closed up in winter, but fully open in warmer times.

You may want to look into the symbolism of free masonry for some examples of the kind of ritualistic architecture that goes on.

Symbols are important, points, lines, triangles, squares, polygons.

Just don't grab some specific sorcery symbols like pentagrams with glyphs and such, since that is really up to the sorcerers personal tastes and current bend of work.

Once you have some base designs, throw down your scribbles and I'll let you know if you are fired or not. Hahha!

Oh don't forget a great big study with plenty of shelf space for books and room to entertain casual guests.

The main entrance and anything thats immediately visible to a grounds person etc, should look totally normal.

I think your teachers idea for "Sorcery" is harry potter, but tell him/her you got help from people who have thought about such a home for decades.








[edit on 15-1-2008 by Legalizer]

You might want a greenhouse for herbs and such, too. Maybe the "earth" sector could have some live plants. Props to Legalizer- the glass domed ceiling is great, maybe a mini-observatory. THe stars and planets are important to sorcerors, I am sure.

thanks for your replys

the client in my project is fictional and i have been given freedom to create his/her personality (job, daily routine, rituals etc)

i think i would need to establish a 'type' of sorcery that my client would be interested in, so i could start my ideas around that. the type with the most rituals/symbology would be easier!

raven bombshell and legalizer, are the points you made specific to one type of sorcery or sorcery as a whole?

thanks for your input though, much appreciated! some really good ideas.

i've always been interested in freemason stuff so i would like to put that into my design (denver airport etc)

i have 4 weeks to design and build a model of the building, so i'll let you know on my progress!

thanks again

Some things aren't worth the money, this isn't one of them.

"Some things aren't worth the money, this isn't one of them"?

what do you mean?

i have to prepare a background for my fictional client tomorrow.

i had the idea of him/her being a scientist studying quantum magic (just something that came up in my research - dosent have to be this) and after many years, eventually practising and using the magic and other types of sorcery as his research grew. im sorry if this seems stereotypical or crude - i have no idea about sorcery and i dont mean to offend. any input you could offer would be greatly appriecated!

thanks

I have to be honest, I dont know anything about "sorcery"- just a little bit about rudimentary magic. I am an artist, so I am going by what I would take from the assignment. All magic deals with the elements and nature, so that was what I based my answers on. Does quantum magic use numerology?

edited for typos and spelling (ohhh the agony)

[edit on 16-1-2008 by raven bombshell]

I have been practicing Magick for many years. My system is pretty much eclectic and I do know about alot of symbols, etc.
Not all mages believe in astrology and numerology, so you will need to decide what your fictional person believes in.
You can check out the OTO and the Golden Dawn.
Something like a Wizard's Tower would be good.

You should have a large circle on the floor (needs to be large enough to hold ritual) with an altar at each compass direction; north, south, etc. Now, different systems believe directions stand for different things. Native American is much different than Wiccan, for example. But in traditional European magickal systems, north stands for the earth; south is for fire; east is for air and west is for water. Items representing the elements should be used. You can make a small altar at each direction - you can use things that represent water, such as sea shells, sacred well water and like that. Fire you can have a candle for, etc.
South, Fire = red
North, Earth = brown and/or green
east, air = yellow
water, west = blue

There should also be a main altar in the center of the circle set with salt, water, athame and whatever else you like, things that have meaning for you. Also something seasonal. You can represent the Sabbats (or seasonal celebrations). There are 8 and they are:

Samhain (Halloween time, old Celtic New Year, Day of the Dead)
Winter Solstice (Yule)
Imbolc (heralding the first ewe's milk, first sign of spring - this is where the Groundhog Day came from)
spring equinox
Beltane (May Day)
summer solstice
Lamas (first harvest festival)
autumn equinox (second harvest festival)

Samhain is also the third and last harvest festival.

A shelf or large nook for various statues of deities such as Aphrodite, Hecate, etc. Symbols to be used include pentacles, runes, and astrological symbols. You can google all of this. Also astrology uses the elements as well with Sag being fire, etc. Again you can Google all of this. If you need
any help I'll be glad to help you, just U2U me. Good luck! This sounds like a fascinating project.
Hope this helps.

My description was pretty basic to western magic systems.

Ignore the religious fanatic in the post above, they are fearful of things that need no fear.

Fear, after all, is the forerunner of failure.

Quantum Magic, i had to look up, doesn't seem steeped in ritual and ceremony.
There would not be much need for anything in particular for such a persons home.

Of course you can mix up your character and add touches of other magic to their quantum beliefs. The world of the occultist is often an amalgam of beliefs.

You might want to add an artifact room where your character has collected various fetishes from his journeys around the globe. I was writing a game with such a room, and killer magical ninjas that steal something important. :-)

My favorite was always Enochian Magick
The way Gerald Scheuller wrote his books was very much like computer programming.
The layout of the Enochian tablets when drawn over to create the names of the entities looks very much like circuitry.

John Dee was a mathematician, scientist, and a spy.
He's the inspiration for 007, used to sign his letters to the Queen with that.
You could model a modern day Dee. :-)
Certainly a modern Dee would be highly educated and deeply scientific in his beliefs.
He'd probably have all kinds of lasers and gizmos for amplifying the expected
effects of his esoteric practices.

Keep at it, character design is a blast, getting to make a house along with the character, challenging, and most likely very satisfying.

Here's a sorceress I made for a class last year Click the pics to blow 'em up and read the text, had to make it all poster sized for class. I kind of copped out on the project and just combined my life with some ex girlfriends and then filled in the blanks with pure fiction.

I seemed to have misplaced my detailed data sheet on the girl.
If I find that or the template I'll throw it online as a helpful resource for you.

legalizer, good idea about the artifact room!
after reading up on Enochian Magick, it seems very interesting...
especially John Dee!
a modern day version of him would fit well with my clients personality.
i'll read up on him some more and try to build up a story.
quick idea - he could he high up in the government or something, an advisor
to the queen? not sure but i'll work on it haha.
i'm guessing the artifacts relating to Enochian Magick would be the tablets etc?
are their any symbols, rituals related to the Magick?
sorry i am googling etc aswell, not being lazy! theres just so much information to look through.

forestlady, the large circle you mentioned... would people stand inside this?
is the golden dawn the modern day order of Enochain Magick?

raven bombshell, you mentioned that all magic deals with the elements and nature,
do you think a sorceror would make use of alot of outdoor areas? what do you think
they would be used for? only 50% of the site for the building can be indoors for this
project.

again thanks for all your help, i wasnt expecting so much support!

this is all very interesting though, i never knew it all existed!

The Golden Dawn uses some Enochian magick, they use a lot of stuff, kabbalah, etc.

Outdoors would certainly be used.
A nice big ancient oak or similar tree is a good thing.

Fountains, statues, and of course all those crazy Enochian squares set in cement and ceramic would be great.

During warm weather who wants to be cooped up inside under robes when you can be outdoors naked? Wiccans call it skyclad. But for say a big fire based ritual, you don't want to do that indoors.

Enochian magic has tons of symbols, based on Dee's tablets and his SigillumDeiAemaeth.

You could totally make your own, just make a grid, slap in some words, then connect the letters randomly using a ruler and bammo, enochian style sigils. Nobody will know the difference.

Your character being in some position of authority would make sense, after all he's got to afford this mega cool structure. He could be Dee's secret offspring, groomed for these centuries in seclusion. Character design is full of possibilities.

The pentacle at the center of the chamber would most likely be circled by others with one person at the center performing the main ritual, while the others repeat the mantra. Think the first Blade with the blood god thing.

I believe in Dees conjuring of spirits he stood in a circle, and the demons etc he was supposed to summon stood in another. At least thats what I'm recalling from some old woodcut.

Don't feel necessary to stick to the books on this.
Make up your own fantastic methods of magick.

Might want to read some Dr. Strange, or rent the new DVD!

this is an image of a disc created by dee..
z.about.com...
i could try and intergrate this into my design

www.geocities.com...
are they the squares you are referring to?

the secret offspring theory sounds alot like the da vinci code haha
nethertheless, a good idea.

you mentioned enochian style sigils... the only experience i've had with sigil's
is the sigil stones on oblivion for xbox 360 haha. are they a similar thing?

when dee spoke to angels, was he alone or did other people witness?

researching this is bringing up some really interesting stuff.

i'm trying to think of ways to use the fact that the house will be on top of a high
rise structure. the way the building is orientated must be important - due to the
watchtowers at north, east etc.

Your first link is the "watchtowers", denoting the four elements.
The second link is one of four squares.
Here they are simplified

This link has the enochian alphabet

About.com has plenty of links including fonts and the like.

Benjamin Rowe covers the history Here

Dee did these works with the help of one charlatan Edward Kelly.
Its suspected that Kelly was conning Dee the whole time.
A good con indeed.

Dee would ask the questions, and Kelly would channel the Angel giving the info.
They had a large stone called the "shew stone" and used it like a ouija board over
the Sigil of Aemeth

As for the sigils, lets see if I can find them.
Hmm no luck, odd.
Here's some from the Goetia, supposed work of Solomon
Enochian symbol are not so complex and artsy in their basic form.

As I said earlier, make a square grid, put letters in it, numbers could do too.
Or just use the squares from the links...

Then draw straight lines from some square to another square, continue until you are satisfied and you've got a sigil! Basically with Enochian the sigils are derived from names of entities. So use each square and see how many sigils you can make from your own name.

Basically you end up with the something like the symbol at the center of this pendant
Or this one
There's a few more down the page here

Note the first one (down the page) is a combination of all four archangel sigils.

The Simon Necronomicon sigil is a good example of combining a few different ones.

Here's the three its sourced from

Its giving me a headache not finding all the Enochian sigils on the tablets,
I'm guessing that particular image is copyright work of Golden Dawn or Schueller,
but find it nearly impossible to believe that assumption.

Chaos magicians use any alphabet or primitive symbol, break it down to simple components, and combine those components into a new image that nobody would know means anything at all. Like take all the straight lines out of the letters in your name, mash whats left over on top of each other, and there you have your Chaos magick style sigil.

I used to do this on balls of masking tape at work...those were interesting times, and really big balls of tape.

This study into ancient western occult is interesting?
Not all that "ooooh beware" spewage that people tend to vomit up.

Its an eclectic study of medieval through contemporary art, philosophy and literature.

If you dropped into this thread saying "Teach me magick so I can have Dragon Ball Z powers"...I'd have passed right on by.

Seriously there are threads here that start like that.



Had to drop back in to mention, if you get to watch Xmen 2 again, the character Nightcrawler has branded himself with Enochian sigils, using the names of the Angels, he says "one for every sin".

One more return to give you that character design document I did last year.
The question and answer section I got from a book on the subject and filled in the details. Fa_1425_CHAREnviroDesign002 as zipped PDF



[edit on 17-1-2008 by Legalizer]

Originally posted by blackflagredstar
"Some things aren't worth the money, this isn't one of them"?

what do you mean?

It's like saying "here, hold this vodoo doll, I've got to jam some pins into it". Sure, you're not the one doing the act, but you're certainly helping.

Main Entry: sor·cery
Date: 14th century
1 : the use of power gained from the assistance or control of evil spirits especially for divining : necromancy
www.m-w.com...

You want to help someone do this? (even if fictionally)

Yes, people would stand inside the circle. You can also have them stand right on the line where the circle is. As someone else mentioned, there should be a pentacle inside, with the circle just outside the pentacle.

Yes I will help someone with their school homework.

Your irrational fear of things you don't understand doesn't make your analogy valid.
Your paranoia and ignorance are threatened by anything that doesn't fit into your bible-centric world view.

There is absolutely no danger in the study of any occult system.
No matter what delusional religious fanatics say.

I'm absolute proof of what I say.

Over twenty years of study without a single instance of any danger or manifestation of evil or whatever nonsense medieval thinking people threaten.

Google enochian magick and you'll be hard pressed to find "oh my it all went wrong demons are attacking me".

Search christian religious experience and you'll find "oh noes demons are attacking me"
There's plenty of that right here on ATS.

You won't find students of the occult willingly bombing other countries or abortion clinics, nor will you find them noosing ethnic people to a tree, nor will you find them constantly running around saying "Beware the devil is gonna getcha" or "this music/art/thinking is of the devil"

But you'll find Christians doing it.

From this we can clearly see whose fiction is the most dangerous.

I think the OP can clearly see why I said privacy is important.

The last thing the client would want is the local paranoid schizophrenic mob marching on his lawn with pickets saying "God hates fags" and "In the name of jesus we cast the demon out" and "The rapture is near".

Legalizer, valid points in the above post. Since saint4god is not helping in anyway, we might as well ignore his narrow minded posts.

Just an update from today, my tutor liked the idea of a modern John Dee, although he had no idea who he was haha.

After showing him the research however he was pretty impressed. He mentioned putting an emphasis on the vertical aspects of the building - to aspire to the heavens in a certain sense (the link with angels?)

I’m also trying to think about movement through the building - an important point in architecture

I put together a rough story on my character.. as you already know a modern version of John Dee - an advisory to the government (albeit secretly, like the original John Dee with the queen) who practises Enochain magic, privately as to not be 'exposed' - this allows aspects of privacy to be added to the building.



Some updates on ideas for the building...

I was looking into "Vaastu Shastra" which like magic, uses the compass points to guide designers. for example, the morning sun is deemed important - which in turn makes the east of the building important, as well as other facts like its favourable to sleep with your head facing south.

Another idea i had was movable vents on the east side of the building to allow air to pass through into the special room - relating to the Air watchtower etc. this is mostly from memory so i may have mixed some facts up. For the west, a sloped roof could allow rain water to be collected (as this falls from the 'heavens') - as the west relates to water. as well as the special room I would apply this to the whole building - for example the west side could house the bathroom (again with water) and the south the living room (fireplace - fire etc) while these are more subtle points, it helps the building fit in with the N,E,S,W points and is a nice touch to show my tutor.

Any comments would be appreciated!

Again, legalizer, thanks for your help... big inspiration for my project!

sorry for any grammar/spelling errors in my post - i'm building a model of the building that my characters house will sit on top of - so internet time is limited haha

Originally posted by blackflagredstar


raven bombshell, you mentioned that all magic deals with the elements and nature,
do you think a sorceror would make use of alot of outdoor areas? what do you think
they would be used for? only 50% of the site for the building can be indoors for this
project.

again thanks for all your help, i wasnt expecting so much support!

this is all very interesting though, i never knew it all existed!

You dont necessarily need an outdoor area- you could bring nature indoors using planters, window boxes, etc. If you went with the sky light idea you would have a good natural light source. I am seeing a greenhouse/observatory type atrium. You have a huge amount of possibilities.